Exclusive-Kennedy’s health officials explored US ban of some widely used antidepressants, sources say
By Yasmeen Abutaleb and Bo Erickson
WASHINGTON, May 8 (Reuters) – Surgeon General Robert F. Kennedy Jr., two people familiar with the discussions, said. U.S. health department officials last week explored whether they could ban some of the widely prescribed antidepressant class of drugs as they prepare to implement a plan to reduce their use.
Their interest is focused on specific treatments in a class known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, such as Zoloft, Prozac and Lexapro, which have been available in the U.S. for decades, one of the sources said. The sources did not say which drugs were being examined for restrictions or how far along investigations into them were.
Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services “has not had any discussions regarding banning SSRIs, and claims to the contrary are false,” agency spokesman Andrew Nixon said in a statement.
Kennedy on Monday announced initiatives aimed at reducing SSRI use while trying to reassure Americans who still want to take them. These include reimbursement guidelines for doctors who help patients wean off medications, as well as plans to share data on prescribing trends and investments in education for healthcare providers.
“Psychiatric medications have a role in care, but we will no longer view them as the default medication,” Kennedy said Monday at the Mental Health and Extreme Medicine Summit. “Let me be clear: If you are on psychiatric medication, we are not telling you to stop.”
About one in six U.S. adults reported taking SSRI medications, which are now widely available in generic form, according to a 2026 study in the medical journal BMJ Mental Health. The American Psychiatric Association considers SSRIs to be the first-line, evidence-based treatment for depression.
KENNEDY’S PAST SSRI CLAIMS LACK OF EVIDENCE
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has authority over their use, and any new restrictions would require strong scientific evidence that the risks to patients outweigh the benefits. Drug approval experts said it could take months or years for new evidence to be reviewed.
Kennedy and supporters in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement oppose the widespread use of SSRI antidepressants; They argue they are over-prescribed, especially to children, and are extraordinarily difficult to quit, with withdrawal symptoms that Kennedy has previously said are worse than heroin.
Kennedy also linked SSRIs to violence, including mass shootings, without evidence and said they posed a risk to fetuses when pregnant women took them. In November, Kennedy said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was investigating whether SSRI treatments contributed to mass violence, but did not elaborate on that effort.
The psychiatric association said in a statement following Kennedy’s announcement on Monday that it supports plans for better research to help doctors prescribe treatments and decide when a patient can recover from them. He strongly opposed “framing the nation’s mental health crisis primarily as a problem of ‘overmedication’ or ‘overprescribing.'”
After months of tension with the White House, Kennedy agreed to step away from widely criticized efforts to rewrite U.S. vaccine policy that could hurt Republicans’ chances of keeping control of Congress in November’s midterm elections and instead focus on more popular initiatives.
Experts in drug regulation have said the FDA does not have the authority to unilaterally impose bans on long-standing drugs that have already received U.S. approval without new evidence of a safety problem or a finding that the original application seeking approval contained false statements. The FDA may ask a drug manufacturer to recall the drug, but the company may refuse.
Last month, for example, the FDA recommended withdrawing approval of Tavneos, an Amgen drug for rare autoimmune diseases, due to a lack of proven efficacy and misrepresentative claims in its original application. Amgen said it was confident that Tavneos was a safe and effective drug and declined to withdraw the drug.
(Reporting by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Bo Erickson; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Bill Berkrot)
